Crocodile invading drug scene

Dangerous drug is coming from Poland, further east

Prague, Aug 8 (ČTK) — A new kind of narcotic, dubbed “crocodile,” has reached the Czech Republic, daily Lidové noviny (LN) writes today, adding that this is an extremely dangerous drug that is mainly coming from the East, former Soviet countries and China.

“It seems to be available on the Czech-Polish border, though in our community no one has tried it,” Chudomel said.

The impact of the use of crocodile is horrible, LN writes.

“There is the outer similarity with the animal. It bites parts of your tissue,” Viktor Moravčík, head of the National Monitoring Centre for Drug Addiction, said.

“It virtually eats you up,” Moravcik said.

The name of crocodile also has a different explanation. An intermediate product in the production of a drug is called chlorocodile, LN writes.

The spread of crocodile and further new drugs from the East has two causes, experts told the paper.

First, a growing demand. In other words, the growth in the number of Czech drug addicts, LN writes.

Second, the unpredictable, often miserable quality of the pervitin (metamphetamine, also dubbed crystal) sold in the streets, it adds.

The crocodile, whose efficient substance is desomorphine, is, in fact, a bad “brown.” This brown powder is known to the drug addicts from the time before the arrival of heroin to the Czech Republic before the war in the former Yugoslavia, LN writes.

Since the 1970s, it was used as a surrogate to heroin. It is produced from the drugs that contain codeine, just as the crocodile does, it adds.

In Prague alone, there are an estimated 16,000 problematic drug users and in the whole of the Czech Republic, the number may have reached about 40,000, the paper writes.